Best practice for a VMware vSphere datastore

I've got a setup at my workplace with an Ubuntu machine sharing a NFS store which I connect to from my ESXi machine.

These machines are connected with a 1GB ethernet line, through a switch but it works fine. I havent seen any read issues and the speed seems like it should be at the RAID 5 config I got on the share-machine.

I haven't tried checking performance with iSCSI, but it might be worth a shot.

The easiest way to set it up is by NFS I guess (as stated, havent tried iSCSI)

What kind of NAS do you have?

I apologize for missing a critical information.
The NAS is a NetGear ReadyNAS 3100 NAS.
It will be used to host either as a VMware datastore and a CIFS share used by Veeam backup.
Regards
marius

As stated above, I havent had any performance problems on my setup, although I only have 2 VM's on that datastore though.

The X-RAID will probably give you the performance you need. What kind of machines are we talking about? Is it heavy on the read/write or only print services or domain servers?

And I guess the veeam is running at night?

How many disks are you using at the moment?

And from what I can read, if you define the share as iSCSI you can define the sharesize. With NFS you use the entire volume, no matter what, and how many shares you have.

Slasky wrote:

I've got a setup at my workplace with an Ubuntu machine sharing a NFS store which I connect to from my ESXi machine. These machines are connected with a 1GB ethernet line, through a switch but it works fine. I havent seen any read issues and the speed seems like it should be at the RAID 5 config I got on the share-machine. I haven't tried checking performance with iSCSI, but it might be worth a shot. The easiest way to set it up is by NFS I guess (as stated, havent tried iSCSI) What kind of NAS do you have?

Centos is also good in NFS store. We're currently using this and so far, everything runs smooth.

If you're going to be running intensive application's I think RAID-10 would be better then x-raid2 (5)

Commander_Cody wrote:
If you're going to be running intensive application's I think RAID-10 would be better then x-raid2 (5)

Write performance would be faster, though capacity would of course be lower.

Not sure if there is a newer revision of this doc, its two years old, but may be a good starting point:

Application_Notes-ReadyNAS_iSCSI_as_VMWare_Datastore-v1.pdf